MOLECULAR TOOLS TO STUDY MICROBIAL DIVERSITY

Microorganisms are the pillars of life on Earth. Over billions of years, they have evolved into every conceivable niche on the planet. Microbes reshaped the oceans and atmosphere and gave rise to conditions conducive to multicellular organisms. Only in the past decade have we started to peer deeply into the microbial cosmos, and what we have found is amazing. Microbial ecosystems behave, in many ways, like large-scale ecosystems, although there are important exceptions. The diversity of microbes presently living on earth is known to be high and is thought to be enormous, but the true extent of microbial diversity is largely unknown. New molecular tools are now permitting the diversity of microbes to be explored rapidly and their evolutionary relationships and history to be defined.This book gives an exhaustive information of the various molecular tools involved in analyzing microbial diversity.